Tom has done it again with his review of the Linksys CIT30 Phone for Yahoo! Messenger. My take on this nifty new gadget is it is great but. But what you ask? How can such a cool new sleek device with built in presence and the ability to connect with all your Yahoo! contacts need improvement?. Well simply these devices are not interoperable and as such they stink. Sure they work fine with other users of the same service but we need all these devices federated and ideally everyone will support SIP. I don’t want a Yahoo! phone, a Google phone a Skype phone and why not a bat phone while I am at it. I want a single phone allowing me to use VoIP to speak with other people who also use VoIP. Why must this be so difficult?

It is time for a hardware manufacturer to come up with a phone that works with all the various frequencies and protocols. Just make it simple and make it work and I will buy it.

It is worth noting that Tom touched on these points as well:

Room For Improvement

Currently, the Linksys CIT310 doesn’t support incoming instant messages (IMs) – neither does the Linksys CIT200 Skype model. I’d even settle for a simple alert message on the phone that an incoming IM came in, in case you’re away from your desk, but obviously the actual message would be even cooler. As with all these proprietary phones I’ve tested – whether they work exclusively with Skype, or now exclusive to Yahoo, I wish they’d be more open and support industry standards, such as SIP. Yahoo Voice does use SIP, but as far as I can tell, the Linksys CIT310 is "locked" to using Yahoo. If instead of "replacing" Yahoo Voice as the SIP termination service provider, it would be nice if the phone at least supported adding in your own SIP credentials in addition to supporting Yahoo Voice. But alas, as with any industry, exclusive partnerships are often the key to success, so who am I to knock Linksys and Yahoo for doing this?